It Was Great Theater, but Golf Was All Wet

LA QUINTA — If you like great golf, it’s a good thing you didn’t come down to the Jack Nicklaus Resort course at PGA West this week.

Of course, by that I mean if you like guys hitting 62s on their own ball or shooting birdies and eagles on every other hole, and never leaving the fairway, hitting 34 consecutive greens, that kind of thing.

If you’re like me, the sound of a ball splashing in the water is our song. If you’re a big fan of double bogeys, if you like to see the greatest players in the world struggling to keep the ball dry and inbounds, you missed some great moments in golf.

They had the four certified heavyweight champions of golf. And, in 36 holes, they had nine sixes, two sevens, 11 balls in the water and two out of bounds. Nobody broke par.

In a regular tournament, they might all have missed the cut. It would have done your heart good. “Cart golf,” one of the participants called it. You felt like leaning over and tapping one of them and saying, “What’s your handicap?” or, “Do you get strokes on this hole?”

But if it was hardly golf’s finest hour, it was great theater.

And when it was over, Greg Norman had won the Grand Slam of Golf Wednesday.

Well what, you may ask, is that ? Do I mean he won the U.S. Open, British Open, Masters and PGA in the same calendar year?

Well, not exactly. Only Bobby Jones won Grand Slams like those. Nobody has won one since and the only guy who came close was Ben Hogan in 1953, when he won the British, U.S. and Masters, but couldn’t play in the PGA--then 36 holes a day of match play--because of chronic leg inflammation.

This Grand Slam was two rounds in the desert. A kind of made-for-television extravaganza.

But it’s still the most exclusive tournament in the world, golf’s House of Lords.

You don’t get in because you finished 125th on the money list, or were in the top 16 last year at the Masters, or won a PGA 22 years ago and got a lifetime exemption or because a sponsor gave you an open spot.

You got in because you won one of the hardest tournaments in the world to win this year, a Grand Slam event. You get in a Tournament of Champions if you won any tournament last year; you get in this one because you won a major. A lot of great players never have.

To give you an idea what kind of history this event would have produced if it had been in existence at the time, here are a few of the matchups we would have had: 1946, Hogan, Sam Snead, Lloyd Mangrum and Herman Keiser would have played off. And if you think a Hogan-Snead head-to-head was commonplace, you don’t know golf.

In 1948, we would have had Hogan, Henry Cotton and Claude Harmon.

In 1962, we would have had Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Gary Player.

In 1981, we had Nicklaus, Seve Ballesteros and Tom Watson.

It should be the toughest ticket in golf. It’s not one of those contrived trash-sport specialties. It’s not gimmick golf, tabloid golf. It’s the real article. But it was 11 years before it finally lured all four bona fide current major winners into its field. Some years, it had to cancel altogether.

One year, 1990, they practically had to canvass the audience for volunteers to come up with a fourth. They chose a seven-handicapper named Mike Ditka. If you want to think about that, just imagine John Daly coaching the Bears.

It should be an idea whose time has come. This week, for the third year in a row, all four heavyweight titlists of the game got together here. They had a classic field--Paul Azinger, everybody’s pick to be the next Tom Watson; Lee Janzen, U.S. Open winner; Bernhard Langer, the greatest player ever to come out of Germany, and Greg Norman.

Norman won, which was fitting. He is probably the most exciting player in the world today. Part of the excitement is his ability to take an exquisite round and turn it into unbearable suspense by suddenly hitting shots that come right out of a midnight driving range. He changes from Ben Hogan to Benny Hill.

He did it again, turning a seven-shot lead into a nail biter before he finally won when young Janzen, on the final hole, had a 182-yard shot out of a lakeside bunker--and hit it 162 yards. It was a Titanic shot. It sank.

Norman blamed the shoddy golf on geometry.

“All nature is built on a curve,” he explained. “Only man conceives of a straight line. This course is all right angles. You don’t play the hole, you crash into it. “

Sometimes, of course, you splash into it.

Norman likened the week’s play to a mackerel shining in the moonlight. You didn’t know whether to hold your breath or hold your nose.

The notion of a major champion playing less than impeccable golf is not new. Back in 1935, Sam Parks Jr. was a surprise U.S. Open winner. He went on tour with runner-up Jimmy Thompson. After five cities, the tour was canceled for lack of attendance.

“It turned out Parks could only shoot 75s,” Thompson complained.

“And that was the only year where four 75s with one 60-foot no-brainer putt would win the Open. Nobody pays to see 75s.”

Depends, of course, who’s doing the 75s. Personally, I’m a big fan of sixes and sevens on the scorecards of great players. I’m just sorry there aren’t a whole bunch of X’s, like on mine.